Erratic Trouble rsyncing between windows share and linux

[Adnan]

Rob,

Do you know how long does it take to sync.  What kind of HW you have on
both the machines? Any GigaBit network?

Walls Rob W Contr 75 CS/SCBS wrote:

> Things seem to be working now. It fixed itself after a dozen or so sync
> cycles. It was pretty traumatic watching all those files being deleted, but
> they were eventually restored on subsequent cycles. I don't know if anyone
> else has experienced this, but in my case things worked out OK. I suspect
> that rsync was working fine, but there must be some odd subtleties in file
> attributes or even file size issues in the way I'm feeding rsync the source
> directory.
> 
> Rob Walls
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Walls Rob W Contr 75 CS/SCBS [mailto:Rob.Walls at hill.af.mil] 
> Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2004 3:26 PM
> To: 'rsync at lists.samba.org'
> Subject: Erratic Trouble rsyncing between windows share and linux
> 
> 
> I am trying to rsync between two linux boxes, but one of the linux boxes is
> using samba to map a share from a windows SAN onto it's file system. Rsync
> quit working properly when I changed the source directory from a local ext3
> filesystem to the windows share mapped onto the filesystem. This setup may
> be kind of odd, but I need to keep user's data on the SAN and I also need
> the linux box to generate dynamic content which is all then mirrored using
> rsync to a remote web server. I can't run rsync or ftp directly on the SAN
> machine or have any control of the SAN other than file permissions, so I
> thought rsync would work just as well as it always has. Well, now old files
> are seemingly arbitrarily picked up as needing synchronizing when they don't
> and a different set of (also a random set of old files) are picked every run
> of rsync. Weird. New files ARE accurately found and synchronized, however.
> But, worst of all, seemingly random files are deleted from the remote box,
> since I am using the delete option. 
> I've heard there is a file mod time resolution difference between linux and
> windows, but it seems that would produce more consistent symptoms. 
> The only difference between the previous working and current non-working
> rsync setups is that now one of the source directories is mapped from a
> windows machine (I used mount -t smbfs, because smbmount didn't seem to want
> to work either, sheesh). All rsync versions, exclude file contents and
> calling syntax is the same. The source directory I'm having problems with
> has 100,000+ files and is about 4.5Gb total size. Does anyone have any ideas
> as to why this is not working using a samba share?
> 
> Rob Walls
>